Jarvis Cocker: 'His songs mythologise and deflate; they make the mundane seem oddly beautiful and the supposedly beautiful awkward.' Photograph: David Levene

Jarvis Cocker knows something about audacious moves – he was the man, after all, who wiggled his arse in the general direction of Michael Jackson. But even shaking one's posterior at the King of Pop pales before having your song lyrics published by the same company that publishes Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and TS Eliot.

Unlike his revered fellow Faber authors, Cocker – who has recently taken up an editor-at-large role at the company – is not a poet, and in his introduction to Mother, Brother, Lover, his new collection of selected lyrics, he repeatedly stresses that while the book's cover may resemble the cover of a poetry collection and the printed lyrics make look like poems on the page, poems they are not. "Lyrics are not poetry, they are the words to a song," he writes, adding that "seeing a lyric in print is like watching the TV with the sound turned down: you're only getting half the story". Another metaphor would be that seeing a lyric in print is to see the songwriter unclothed: the words huddle on the cold white page, stripped of melody and music, defenceless without their creator's physical charisma or theatrical delivery. Mother, Brother, Lover is, then, Jarvis Cocker stripped naked.

Cocker's band Pulp released their first album in 1983, but mainstream success didn't arrive until the mid 90s with their album Different Class, which included songs such as "Common People", "Disco 2000" and "Sorted for E's and Wizz". Cocker wrote songs that were narrative-driven tales told with flashes of wit and glints of anger which, in his words, married "inappropriate subject matter to fairly conventional pop song structures". More than Blur and certainly more than Oasis, the words to Pulp songs mattered. So it is somewhat arresting to read Cocker declare in the introduction that "the words to a song are not that important". Fortunately, he goes on to say that this can be creatively exploited: underneath the comforting melodies, the canny songwriter can smuggle in discomforting lyrics.

Cocker's songs mythologise and deflate; they make the mundane seem oddly beautiful and the supposedly beautiful seem, if not mundane, at least awkward. About his home city he writes in "Sheffield Sex City": "On a hilltop at 4am the whole city is your jewellery box. A million twinkling yellow street lights. Reach out and take what you want." In Cocker's world, Sheffield is beautiful but sex is awkward and often dirty. I can't think of a songwriter who makes sex sound seedier than Cocker: "It wouldn't be the same if we didn't know it was wrong… I want to catch you unawares, undressing in front of a window" ("Street Lites"); "I've been sleeping with your wife for the past 16 weeks" ("I Spy").

The faultline of class runs through this work; "Cocaine Socialism", "Cunts Are Still Running the World" and, most famously, "Common People" burn with a refreshingly un-ironic rage.

Jarvis Cocker has said his songs are the closest thing he has to a diary and Mother, Brother, Lover can be read as both a personal journal and a record of the last three decades of British history. Cocker has provided extensive notes on the songs which include references to the miners' strike, Sheffield city council's policy of providing cheap bus travel, the pop show Razzmatazz and the catchphrase of magician Paul Daniels. I had no idea that the Deborah mentioned in "Disco 2000" was a real person. I devoured such details, but they will be lost on anyone not already familiar with the songs. The songs I knew intimately were impossible to read without hearing the song in my head; the less well-known, oddly, were more rewarding to read as they could be experienced only as literary works. It seems unlikely, however, that anyone who was not an admirer of Jarvis Cocker will be persuaded by this collection. Its critics will claim Mother, Brother, Lover is an act of vanity; Cockers' fans – noting how the book resembles its author with its handsome brown jacket worn over a slim body – are more likely to consider it a validation. Song lyrics may not be poetry but that does not mean they should not be taken seriously: Jarvis Cocker is one of our finest songwriters and in Mother, Brother, Lover he provides the evidence in black and white.